Alex King: WordPress Themes Versus Templates

While the theme system works well as advertised, it doesn’t work exactly the way I like to set up my web front-end code. Luckily, it is so flexible that I can easily implement my preferred system.

The standard theme set-up has a header file, footer file, sidebar file and index, single and page files that include the header, footer and sidebar. This is all well and good, but if you make a change to your overall layout, you often have to make it in 3 places (the index, single and page files).

I prefer a template approach, where I have a master template that has a few “holes” in it for content. This is a little different in concept from the standard theme set-up, but it is important to implement it so that it follows the normal theme conventions – that things that rely on those conventions don’t break.

As I work on my article series on Building a Blog, I will be addressing this issue of incorporating external files into WordPress Theme template files and creating a “master template” effect. Stay tuned!